Rep. Paul Ryan is trying to get a reform package together by December.

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For the 14th year in a row, Congress missed the deadline for the fiscal year that began Saturday — as it did last year, passing eight stopgap spending measures that often brought the government within days or hours of shutting down.

Today, four days into the 2012 fiscal year, the House of Representatives will vote on the second "continuing resolution" to keep the government open — but only through Nov. 18.

And with Congress dancing dangerously close to default in August as it debated an increase in the debt limit, even members of Congress are concluding that its purse strings have become so hopelessly tangled that only a powerful deficit-reduction "supercommittee" can untie them.

"It used to be that one of the ways Congress was judged was the number of appropriations they passed by the end of the fiscal year," said Stan Collender, a budget expert and partner at Qorvis Communications. "Now we say it's a success when Congress avoids a government shutdown. Talk about decreased expectations."

Today, the Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing on ways to improve the federal budget process. The House had similar hearings last month, and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., says he hopes to have a package of reforms ready by the end of the year.

"When members of Congress don't want to confront the difficult policy decisions, they start talking about process, and we may be in that phase now," said Roy Meyers, a political science professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

Some of the specific proposals to fix the budgeting process that Congress could see this year:

•A two-year budget. Under current law, the president presents a budget every February — and Congress is supposed to pass it by July. That rarely happens. Moving the cycle to every two years would allow more time to get it done, said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who wrote supercommittee members last week urging them to recommend the proposal.

Biennial budgeting will "give us the first year of a Congress to pass a budget, and the second year to do oversight and accountability," she said.

Ryan supports the concept. "What Congress basically does is spend all of its time spending, and very little time overseeing whether that spending is effective or not," he said.

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a former skeptic of the idea, said Congress has only passed a budget in an election year once in the last decade, so a two-year budget, "is in effect what Congress has been doing anyway."

•A joint budget resolution. Currently, the House and Senate pass the budget as what's called a "concurrent resolution" — a measure that deals with the internal operation of Congress. Making it a joint resolution would give it the force of law, requiring the president's signature.

"What we're trying to do is give teeth to the process, so we actually have a process," Ryan said. Getting the president on board early could "front-load" the difficult decisions, staving off contentious battles later on, he said.

•Line-item lite. Congress gave the president the ability to veto specific measures in spending bills in 1996 — but the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in 1998 because it gave the president too much spending power. A modified proposal, called "expedited rescission," would allow the president to send a package of cuts back to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

•Fixing the baseline. To figure how much any proposal will cost, the Congressional Budget Office needs to compare it to a "baseline" of projected spending over the next 10 years. But that baseline assumes that current law stays in place — and it rarely does.

"The 'current law' baseline," former CBO director Rudy Penner told the House committee last month, "is useless because so many tax cuts and spending increases are passed on a temporary basis even though we're essentially certain that they will be extended."

So many groups create their own baselines with different assumptions. "If every member becomes a scorekeeper, or every committee becomes a scorekeeper, it's chaos," Conrad said.

Can these proposals force Congress to pass a budget on time, without the threat of a shutdown or a default?

"There's only one thing under the United States Constitution that Congress is supposed to do every year. And that's pass a budget," said David Walker, the former comptroller general and founder of the non-partisan Comeback America Initiative, which advocates fiscal responsibility. "There's no sanction for not doing that, and maybe that needs to change."

What kind of sanction? "How about you don't get paid?" he said.

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